Jihadist Groups Fill a Palestinian Power Vacuum

Islamist groups are vying for influence in Gaza in a race to fill the security vacuum created by fighting between Fatah and Hamas.

STEVEN ERLANGER and HASSAN M. FATTAH

JERUSALEM, May 30 — It was 2 a.m. when masked gunmen raided Al Wafa Net in the Khan Yunis camp in Gaza where 17 young men were surfing the Internet.

“The gunmen tied their hands, then forced them to stand at the stairs while they broke all the screens, and then the server and the television and the photocopier,” said the owner, Hamad, of the attack a few months ago. “Then they burned all 36 computers.”

In recent months in Gaza, there have been similar attacks on music and video shops and pharmacies accused of selling Viagra, as well as on American and United Nations schools.

A standoff between the Lebanese Army and Islamists at a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon has focused attention on a jihadist element taking root there as well as a radicalization in the Palestinian areas themselves.

With the fragmentation of authority in Gaza, and its isolation, said a Gazan analyst, Taysir Mhaisin, “there is an increase of fundamentalism and the birth of groups believing in violence and practicing violence as a model created by bin Ladenism.”

Mouin Rabbani, a Jordan-based analyst of Palestinian politics for the International Crisis Group, said, “There is a security vacuum that creates space for all kinds of new grouplets and forces.”

Palestinian authority, both in the Palestinian areas and in refugee camps in Lebanon and beyond, used to lie in the hands of Fatah, the nationalist faction once led by Yasir Arafat. But after the entry of militant Hamas into politics, its 2006 electoral defeat of Fatah and the battles between them, jihadi freelancers with murky links are filling a vacuum in Gaza and in the camps in Lebanon.

Bush administration officials say they are increasingly concerned that Hamas and even more radical groups may be hijacking the Palestinian movement. The officials say they see no operational connection between what is happening in Palestinian camps in Lebanon and the deterioration in Gaza. But they say they do see an ideological link, with hopeless and marginalized young people turning to jihad because they believe that more secular or moderate options have failed them.

In the squalid streets of the Ain al Hilwe refugee camp outside the southern Lebanese city of Sidon, people like Abu Ahmed Taha are bracing for a fight they have long been dreading.

Militias in the camp of 47,000 roam the streets armed and ready; skirmishes break out sporadically and tensions have never been higher. For Mr. Taha, the real danger is that the fastest-growing militias are those of jihadis with wholly different aspirations from his.

“There is a central problem and that is Al Qaeda, and they are spreading,” Mr. Taha said, after an emergency meeting of religious and political leaders in the camp last week to calm tensions. “The Islamic awakening has been going on for 25 years now. But this, now, is going to become a huge problem for us.”

Mr. Taha’s fears are remarkable because of who he is: not a secular campaigner or a Fatah apparatchik, but a senior member of Hamas. In the violent underground of the militias, men like him have become unlikely moderates, calling for calm and seeking to build bonds with the other militias and the government.

Security officials and analysts say groups inspired by Al Qaeda have had a presence in the Palestinian camps in Lebanon for a decade, where they have thrived, taking advantage of the lawlessness and poor living conditions. In Lebanon, Palestinians are not allowed to own property and are limited in the kind of work they can do. They generally enjoy few rights.

Ain al Hilwe, too, became a jihadi hotbed about five years ago. More than 25 men from there alone have gone to Iraq to fight, Hamas and Fatah officials say, never to be seen again. And jihadis there say more are ready to go.

Mr. Taha notes that the new groups make it easy to join. Whereas it may take years of inculcation for a young man to become a full-fledged member of Hamas, he can become a member of the jihadi militias just by declaring fealty, Mr. Taha said. And rather than focusing on a political education, the militia members focus on a global fight coupled with religious sloganeering.

Whether these jihadist groups are part of Al Qaeda or simply local bands of religious fanatics, Westerners and their institutions are now more clearly under attack throughout the region, including in Gaza, as seen in the bombing of the schools and in the kidnappings of two Fox News correspondents and of Alan Johnston, the BBC’s Gaza correspondent. A shadowy group called the Army of Islam claims that it kidnapped Mr. Johnston in March.

In Gaza, where residents tend to be more religiously observant than those in the West Bank, Palestinians say Al Qaeda has had less of an impact than a growing band of religious fanatics. The groups are striking out at what they consider to be moral and religious corruption, using popular religious justifications for common acts of criminal kidnapping and extortion. The targets — like the Internet cafe where young men look at screens behind closed doors — seem to be symbols less of Westernization or secularism than of perceived moral corruption.

Hamas and the smaller group Islamic Jihad have long made attacks on Israel and its occupation of what they consider Palestinian lands their main focus. While this has led many, including the United States and the European Union, to call them terrorist groups, Hamas officials say their fight is with Israel’s occupation, not with foreigners.

By contrast, attacks on Western targets, and on the United States in particular, for its presence in the Middle East, have been the main stamp of Al Qaeda and similar groups.

Hamas’s choice to enter politics and the Palestinian government created an opening for a minority who think that the group is giving up its principles — its opposition to Israel and commitment to “resistance.”

Yuval Diskin, director of the Israeli internal security agency, Shin Bet, has said that he sees “ties” and “connections” between global jihad and groups in Gaza, aided by the Internet, Arabic satellite channels and the smuggling of arms and people into Gaza.

Writing in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, a former C.I.A. analyst and National Security Council official, Bruce Riedel, suggested that Gaza “is already divided between Hamas and Fatah, and there is evidence that a small Al Qaeda apparatus is forming there.”

But Mr. Diskin is careful not to speak of “Al Qaeda,” which he regards as losing its meaning, but only of “global jihad” the network of Islamist and anti-Western ideas associated with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

Israeli officials say they see Hamas as most threatened by Al Qaeda, whose second in command, Ayman al-Zawahri, has twice criticized Hamas for entering politics.

Mr. Rabbani, the Jordan-based analyst, said “it’s very unclear whether any jihadist elements have managed to infiltrate the Gaza Strip, and I suspect if so, it’s minimal, and probably not at all.” As for those in Gaza claiming links to Al Qaeda, Mr. Rabbani said, “They are a mix of Al Qaeda wannabes or are using Al Qaeda language for their own purposes.”

With the fragmentation of Palestinian life and society, “the suffocation of Gaza by the Israelis” and the fierce Palestinian infighting, “Gaza is very fertile ground for fundamentalism and these jihadist ideas,” said Mr. Mhaisin, the Gazan analyst.

“The American occupation in Iraq was a strong incentive for these groups to be born,” he said, “and there are political parties in the region that have employed these groups, including Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon, for their own interests.”

The Army of Islam in Gaza is similarly shady, Mr. Mhaisin said. “It’s very difficult to find a detailed description of such groups,” he said. “It’s like the movement of ghosts, but there are signs: the burning of Internet cafes, statements on the Internet, various fatwas.”

Some gunmen work for political factions, some work for their clan, some work for criminal gangs with a political or religious veneer and some work for anybody. And some are influenced by the religious and political extremism in the air.

“With Arabic satellite channels and the Internet, it’s not necessary to communicate with jihadist groups,” Mr. Mhaisin said. “It is a form of communication that can replace coming together to form a party. And young people feel a threat, even if they don’t know from where. They believe in what they’re doing and they don’t always realize that they’re being employed by someone else. This to me is the most dangerous thing today — the political employment of young people by regional forces.”

Still, Mr. Zawahri’s latest criticism of Hamas struck home in Gaza.

“Hamas has sold out so it can keep a hold of a third of government,” Mr. Zawahri said. “But what government? A government that doesn’t even have the right to enter or leave without Israeli permission.”

The criticism stung, Mr. Rabbani, the Palestinian analyst, noted. Hamas, which had dismissed Mr. Zawahri’s criticism a year before as irrelevant, chose to answer in detail.

But after a year in power, Hamas had little to show, making the criticism more pointed. Its coalition deal with Fatah has not ended the Western diplomatic and financial isolation of the Hamas-led government.

“Hamas is heading in the direction of being neither fish nor fowl,” Mr. Rabbani said. “They’re neither engaged in a meaningful political process or in military action, while claiming to be both and having found the magic formula for reconciling the two.”

In an atmosphere of increasing disillusionment, he noted, it is Hamas, powerful in Gaza, which is also most at risk. “The emergence of anything like Al Qaeda in Gaza will be a much more significant threat to Hamas than to Fatah,” he said.

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